


About Her

by blythechild



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Absence, Denial of Feelings, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Imaginary Friends, Romantic Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-25 12:02:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For as long as Emily can remember, she's had an imaginary friend. In time, she starts to believe that he may be based on an actual person. </p><p> </p><p>This is a work of fanfiction and as such I do not claim ownership over the characters herein. This work contains adult themes and shouldn't be read by those under the age of 14.</p>
            </blockquote>





	About Her

**Author's Note:**

> This story was created for a picture prompt in the picfor1000 community on livejournal where writers are challenged to create works of EXACTLY 1000 words. The picture rights belong to the original photographer, and the image was only used as inspiration and is not literally represented. 
> 
> This story was also influenced by the song "About Her" by Malcolm McLaren.

Her parents were high altitude clouds: ever changing and always moving. As a child she tripped and tumbled after them caught up in the wake of the winds that carried them all to distant lands, but she never managed to catch up. She was earthbound and they were atmospheric; they orphaned her when they created her. 

It wasn’t surprising when her subconscious provided her with a companion. Her first memory of him was in a childhood fever dream, but she wondered if he’d always been there. The thin, happy little boy with the light coloured hair… he ran ahead of her, head tilted towards the sun, smiling. Slowly he turned back to her, his face shadowed from the sunlight, and held out his hand. She reached out with the strange feeling that he’d wait for her, no matter what. After that, she refused to think of herself as an only child - she just had a little brother that no one else could see.

As she grew, he traveled with her. From one posting to the next, through the awkwardness, the betrayals, the revelations, and the heartbreaks - he never wavered, smiling with his hand outstretched as his hair tangled in the wind around his head. It got so that she could conjure up the memory of him and it allowed her to push through the bullet wounds and the undercover assignments and the isolation as yet another man walked away from her. Her little brother saved her all the time. She didn’t want to consider what it said about her that a twenty-five year old dream of a boy on a beach was more real to her than her waking life.

She landed a job at the F.B.I. She sat at a desk previously occupied by another troubled brunette; she could feel everyone making comparisons. He was the first one to breach the gulf: brittle, skittish, barely more than a boy himself and afraid of who he might become. She liked him immediately and he became hers to protect. 

The beginning hadn’t been easy. Kidnap, torture, near-death experiences... She barely knew him but she took his wounds for her own. Then came the drugs. When she called him on it he lashed out - why should she care? In truth, she shouldn’t, but at night her little brother came to her, his body a little taller, a little lankier than before… When the heartbreaking call came from a payphone in a fleabag motel, she didn’t hesitate. She folded his sweat-soaked body into her car and drove him home silently promising to never drop the ball on him again.

They were taken hostage and she stepped forward accepting the beating for both of them. It didn’t even feel like a decision, just the role that she was meant to play. Afterwards, his worried eyes followed her everywhere until she pulled him aside and explained that she was doing her _job_ , and not the one that the Bureau had assigned to her.

“If anything had happened…” He didn’t finish as he looked down at the white-knuckled grip he had on her hand. She was surprised to see her fingers, skin stretched tight over bone, interlaced with his.

Years passed as they defined each other. Her little brother remained - a ghost in the corner of her mind - but she found herself looking at the man across the desk from her more frequently. People made comments: how they finished each other’s sentences, that they stood too close… All of the gossip concluded that it was impossible: they were just too different. Their searching eyes pounced on the details without really seeing what was there. She enjoyed confounding them, slinging an arm casually over his neck as he picked food off her plate in a diner somewhere. It was always the same but it made her smile.

When her past came back to haunt her, she cut and ran leaving him behind without a word. The act snapped their cord of communion. Her bones cracked within and she couldn’t catch her breath for a year. She had to return but it wasn’t the same.

“Don’t say that you did it for me.” He said as he leaned against the bedroom doorway. She tucked a strand of hair behind his ear but he was already miles away, receding from her. The decision to move to London was easier but by that time both he and her little brother had been swallowed by the horizon.

A decade passed. She marked it with bullet wounds, commendations, and early retirement, and he marked it with a failed marriage. There were sporadic letters and calls but mostly there was resentful silence and the slowly-dawning fear of a mistake made more catastrophic by time. Her little brother evaporated. Perhaps she finally outgrew him, or perhaps he had just given up in disgust.

Now she walked along a winter beach as if through a half-remembered dream. He was turned away, his face raised to the sun, smiling. Light sparkled off the surf. Grey streaked through the tangles around his face like early snow. He wrapped his coat around him, his shoes soaked by the tide break, but seemed satisfied. Then he saw her, and slowly raised his hand. 

She tried to imagine him smiling at her as a child. Her breath caught a little. But she had lived on memories long enough; she wanted to see it for herself. She walked forward and took his hand. Finally.

She whispered the story of her little brother into his shoulder as he held her for the first time in years. “Confabulation.” He murmured and pulled her closer.

“You don’t believe it?”

He kissed the corners of her mouth. “If you had been dreaming of me your whole life, I think that we would’ve made it to this beach a lot sooner.”

It didn’t matter. The dream had turned and now the orphan and her savior were closer than skin over bone.


End file.
